Oogh. Such rage bait.
For organizing my stuff I use
yyyy/mm/ddbecause in my opinion it’s much better for that. Otherwisedd/mm/yyyy.ISO datetime, let’s goooooo YYYYMMDDHHmmSS
I meant to say i love month-day-year. August 5, 2026. I love day-month-year too, more than I like month-day-year
I wish US Americans would do this, but when I try to use it, it’s too ambiguous with our mm/dd/yyyy format that already exists. So, I think the US will have to go with YYYYMMDD. That’s the most straightforward and easy to understand method of switching to an entirely numeric date sequence that is logical.
Why? dd/mm/yyyy isnt practical. If you are asking someone to check out part of a book, you wouldn’t say “paragraph 4, chapter 3”, you start broad and become more specific. Calendars, at least in the US, are organized by month. You have turn turn to the month page before finding the date, it makes more sense to say month first because its the first piece of information that you need (unless its a more rare case that you are talking about an event in another year).
Im sure programmers prefer something different, but humans shouldn’t have to communicate differently to make computing easier. Computing exists to make human life easier, not the other way around.
mm/dd/yyyy is horrendous and inconsistent, you can argue that yyyy/mm/dd is correct, but for daily use dd/mm/yyyy is way better
What is inconsistent about it? That’s a weird argument against its use.
I like it because it’s in order of smallest maximum integer. I know that’s not why we use it in the US but it’s still satisfying to me to see the first number smaller than the second on all but 78 days of the year.
I feel like DD/MM/YYYY is the same as doing: ss:mm:HH and I find that confusing.
I see the duality in this but I still think both are valid. When telling the time, there’s usually no point in including the seconds since they’ll have changed before you finish saying the whole thing anyway. In spoken word IMO it makes sense to go from more specific to less specific, and even not include extra parts sometimes (e. g. “today is the 3rd” when it’s expected to know the month and, well, year from context, or “it’s half past” to someone whom you’ve told the time a couple of minutes ago).
That’s really funny. DMY is more like Hms in that it is in descending order of relevance. Most people asking the date or time are looking for the hour of the day or the day of the month, and the rest is context.
Files get sorted by alphanumerical order so ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) is objectively superior in that regard.
My comment was about vocal human interaction, not on a device.
I agree with that in principle, but a) it should be in meta data and b) it should be abstracted so the user can display any format they wish. As a last resort, in the file name, sure. That standard adds a lot of extra time gumpf
Year day month is the only acceptable format.
so how’s the murder rate in heathen land
YYYY-MM-DDYep and it needs to use hyphens and not slashes. It helps avoid missed typos or mis-reads in some situations, especially if hand-written.
and it’s perfectly sortable
oh yeah. There are numerous benefits to the format itself, outside the question of hyphens vs slashes.
I find the sortability quite satisfying, but also as somebody living in the US, I also like that it’s unambiguous regardless of my audience. Hell, half the time I see people hand-write a date on something they don’t even use a year.
There are also variants with single dots too. I sometimes do timestamps without any separator too, depending on the context (such as file backups):
YYYYMMDDin example 20260805.I actually used to do single dots in my own file/folder names. It’s probably my favorite way visually, since it’s a minimal separator and as you showed it works without a separator at all.
ISO 8601 my beloved
In fact the Linux date command even has an iso flag:
date --iso-8601date -Ismy beloved.
YYYY-mm-ddTHH:MM:SS±zzzz
ITT: people saying one thing is better than any other without thinking of context.
If I want to know today’s date ISO 8601 isn’t a good answer. And if I put stuff in folders by date then DD-MM-YYYY is a real bad way to do it. But MM-DD-YYYY is the worst one no matter the context.If I want to know today’s date ISO 8601 isn’t a good answer
Can be tailed to the relevant bit though.
I became an evangelist for YYYY-MM-DD format once I had to deal with a legal battle that had multiple years of documentary evidence. I sorely regretted my choice of naming files when I had to wade through a heckton of upsetting reminders. It got a lot easier when I renamed everything according to YYYY-MM-DD (and the lawyers probably appreciated it too)
The one you grew up with tends to be your preference. But the usual reason I give for MM-DD-YYYY is it matches how it’s said.
December 25th, 2026
12-25-2026
I also know there’s no point in arguing about this because, again, my first sentence. It’s just team sports stuff, as usual. The only reason why you would bother to argue is if you were trying to convince people to use a standard. But as you pointed out, ISO 8601 already exists. That is the agreed upon standard already. But no one uses it, since we have our preferred systems of date format already ingrained.
FYI it’s not really said like that elsewhere, they say
“(Friday the) 25th of December, 2026”
No, you only say the 4th of July that way
No, you only say the 4th of July that way
elsewhere, they say
“(Friday the) 25th of December, 2026”As someone from elsewhere: we dropped the “of”
And no, since I genuinely heard that before, 25th December does not imply that there are 24 other months called December.
I like YYYY-MM-DD because then I don’t have to figure out half the time if they used MM-DD-YYYY or if they were sane.
I agree, if you truncate YYYY-MM-DD you can only shorten it to showing the year and month. Besides, if I ask someone the date and they start from the year I’ll just pull my phone out.
We grew up on MM/DD/YYYY but all our computer stuff is YYYY/MM/DD however now that we live in EU we use DD/MM/YYYY and still YYYY/MM/DD for files in pc
YYYYMMDDHHMMSS
Please use any kind of separation character or I’m gonna lose my mind
Best I can give you is a single “_”
202609041006_15
Most evil place to put it.
Noar
But you’ll end up with months instead of minutes!
I proper shit post would have suggested “mm/dd/yyyy”.
The problem is not the format itself, its just sometimes we don’t know which format is used: 07/07/26
Obviously that’s February 26th 2001
You are so evil! :D
01/02/26
Uh, it’s clearly my first 26th birthday at two in the morning
